If it wasn't for the Commonwealth Games, Canberra sprinter Evan O'Hanlon wouldn't be the reigning world champion.
O'Hanlon was one of 14 athletes Australian chef de mission Steve Moneghetti named on Wednesday for the athletics team to compete on the Gold Coast in April.
Fellow Canberran and world champion Cameron Crombie was also one of the first to be named, with the rest of the team to be announced at the end of February.
O'Hanlon retired after the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, but kept training and working part-time for his parents' architecture business with an eye to competing at a Commonwealth Games on home soil.
But to be eligible for funding and to have a crack at another gold medal that meant he had to compete at the world championships in London last year.
If it wasn't for that, then the 100-metre sprinter in the T38 class - O'Hanlon has cerebral palsy - wouldn't have gone to London and wouldn't have claimed his eighth world title.
The 29-year-old has also won five Olympic Games gold medals, along with the silver he picked up in Brazil when China's Jianwen Hu beat him in a world-record time.
O'Hanlon was able to turn the tables of Hu in the worlds, albeit in a photo finish.
"I'm going to the Gold Coast and I want to win it, I don't make any apologies about that," he said.
"I came out of retirement basically because my event was picked for Commonwealth Games at the Gold Coast and that meant I had to run the world championships last year to be able to hold funding and I didn't particularly want to because I thought I was going to get beaten."
O'Hanlon revealed it wasn't until just three weeks before the worlds that he actually started to believe he could win, thinking Hu had his measure until a training camp in Germany.
"When I went to world champs that's the first time in 10 years that I've raced and thought, 'I'm not going to win this'," O'Hanlon said.
"It wasn't until about three weeks out from world championships that I got over to Germany and was able to train with [my coach Iryna Dvoskina] and we got some really good sessions done.
"I turned to her and said, 'If everything goes 100 per cent my way I can win this'."
It's shaping as a big 12 months for O'Hanlon.
On top of the gold medal he won in London in July, he's hoping for a Commonwealth Games gold as well and his wife was due to give berth in a month.
He's also running at the ACT athletics championships at the AIS arena, which runs from January 26-29, potentially in the able-bodied 100m as well.
Once he gets back from the Gold Coast, O'Hanlon felt he'd retire for good this time.
"Good things come in threes - I won world champs, hopefully I'll win Gold Coast and my wife's due a month from now," he said.
